Browser games became quite pretty business those days, but when gigant such like Electronic Arts publishing one them we are 100% sure that it’s true. “So, what is that web game you talking about?” you will ask. Well, flirtatiously i will only say that we are talking about a game with “Ultima” in title… just to be sure you will read this entry to the whole end ;)

Without a doubt I could point few people which most likely already soiled their paints from happines as they read this. Unfortunetly, all Ultima Online fans should abandon all hope… this game have nothing to do with UO except the mentioned title (used for sure to bring more audience to this game). Well, if you ask me – I would really whiped a person which is responsible for such idea. To bad they ruined opportunity to smuggle a little bit of Lord British into this title.

Anyway, let’s focus on solid facts. Lord of Ultima (LoU) is a strategy game, and in fact for those who knows browser games it tells almost everything. Association with games such as Red Dragon or Evony came to my mind on their own. For those which never heard about those titles – you are getting a town with low amount of resources to your hands, with one purpose only – dominate the rest of the world. If you do this alone or with others it’s your choice.
So you are developping your city. From gaining the resources by building woodcutter’s huts and mines to building military structures which will allow you to recruit various troops.
We can expand on two different ways – by founding new towns or by conquering towns of other people. The catch is that you can only conquer city with castle and what’s more to attack it you need to build castle in your town as well. This soultion allow us to define the way we wanna play the game. Focusing on economical or military aspects of the game, and what’s more we can freely adjust it in the oposite way simply by changing amount of economical and military towns we have.

Except of developing and expanding we can jon to alliance (or create one), we can trade with other players or we have possibility to raid some ruins or monsters which spawn randomly in neighbourhood (killing them allow us to gain various items). As we speak about the items, we need to mention about in-game shop of course. We can buy different items which give us some amount of supplies or simply shorten time needed for building structures/recrutiment of troops. But most interesting is possibility of hireing a ministry (associated with building, defence or war). A ministry allow us to plan actions he perform when we are offline – i.e. recruit some amount of knights as soon as we gonna have needed materials for them. It’s really nice feature but still not strong enough to destroy whole fun for those who doesn’t want to buy anything. In my opinion developers made it rationaly but still encouraging us for little shopping ]:>
In general there is not to much options to perform – for example there is lack of any science research system, but you don’t really need anything else to have fun for a long days.

The most briliant thing in Lord of Ultima is quite open gameplay. What do I mean by that? On every server you have a world divided on few big continents and it’s only up to you how you want to conquer them. You can try all alone (at very begin it can bring pretty good results but in time it become more and more diffilcuit), you can create or join alliance. You can choose agressive or pure economic or combine both of them and still have quite big chances to obtain your goal. You can walk by dead’s man bodies without care about anything else or you can engage into political life and gain power without rising any army at all.
And that’s the best thing in LoU – for a long time i didn’t had such a fun from tracking political movements of various alliances. we have full option here – we have non agression pacts, coalitions, payed mecenaries and blacmails. You can do anything to reach your goal and it’s fun – you want scream “hell yeah, open PvP rox!”. And it’s quite interesting that EA managed to combine carebears and hardcore mechanics in one game allowing to both type of players have fun. I don’t know what do you think, but for me it’s a quite an archivement.

Of course LoU isn’t a game without flaws. We have few annoying bugs like not 100% clear mechanic for calculating battle losses, we have reports which tend to don’t arrive sometimes. But in general this are not things which destroy your fun from playing this game. Sure many thing depends from individual preferences and people you meet in game, but i personally was charmed by this game and i’m recommeding it at least for a try.

PS. If you plan to give a try i suggest to choose one of newest serwers – it will guarantie that game is on early stage there. Of course you can learn game mechanics on any serwer and then get a fresh start on new server ;)